Stupidity of Ethnic Quotas
The recent news that employers may face ethnic quotas is even stupider than you think.
I created a simulation of the hiring process for firms to estimate the chance of falling foul of these quotas even if you are perfectly non-discriminatory.
Assumptions: the population is completely homogenous in terms of skills, and ethnic minorities form 10% of the population.
Let’s suppose that your application for government work will be considered unfavourably if ethnic minorities make up less than half the percentage of your workforce as in the population.
Results:
- If you have 100 employees, and are absolutely completely non-prejudiced against minority applicants, there is a 2.3% chance of breaking the rules anyway.
- If you have 50 employees, there is an 11.3% chance.
Youch! Not the kind of risks a business should be taking. What to do, what to do?
I know, discriminate in favour of minority applicants! What are the statistics for that?
Result:
- If you have 100 employees, you’d better start giving around a 55% greater weight to job applications from ethnic minorities if you want your chance of totally innocently being denied contracts to fall below 1%.
Well at least its clear what you have to do. If you have ten applicants for a position, nine white, one black, you should pick the black guy about 15% of the time.
Of course, this is just what firms should be doing in the long run, obviously if you are below the line right now you need to work a bit harder at being diverse, and give a really much bigger weight to minority applications.
Do I sense a business opportunity here? Do you think firms would pay money for statistical analyses of this type? After all, it’s only good risk management. It could work out the exact ‘affirmative action’ quotient your business needs at any given time.
Of course, since racism certainly exists, for many it won’t be an ‘affirmative action’ quotient, so much as a counterbalance for prejudice that actually exists.
Needless to say, it hardly seems as though policies of this sort are going to end racism as we know it.
(If you want the code for my simulation, ask in the comments. It’s in Ruby)